Elizabeth Gilbert on eating, praying and loving in Jersey

In her best-selling memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert revels in the silence of starry nights in Bali and achieves meditative bliss in India. Near the book’s conclusion, she meets her future husband, and the early days of their courtship are spent on deserted, moonlit beaches. They travel for months, in many exotic locales, and eventually find heaven on earth.

Photo by Mitsu Yasukawa/The Star-LedgerElizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love". Photographed at Two Buttons, a store she runs with her husband Juan in FrenchtownIn New Jersey.

Yes, New Jersey, the most densely populated and chronically congested state in the country.

“Gosh, it’s such a long, complicated story how we ended up in Frenchtown, but to me the biggest selling point is the fact that it’s an on-foot culture here,” says Gilbert, an admitted “big walker.” “It’s a four-season recreation . . . It’s kind of a spiritual and meditative practice and I just feel it’s the pace that beings were meant to move. I’m very anti-velocity. I’m anti-car. In the summertime we innertube, and inner-tubing is the aquatic equivalent of walking, especially on the Delaware, because it’s such a lazy pace.”

Right, it sure ain’t Hoboken.

Dressed in hiking cords and fleece, Gilbert might readily divulge Eddie Bauer as her favorite couturier. Her outdoorsy heritage (she grew up in rural Connecticut, descended from generations of farmers) blessed her with natural good looks that make it easy to doubt her 40 years; she has clear blue eyes, wispy, Nordic-blond hair and a playful laugh that never quits.

She’s been feeling the love, and not just because Cupid is out bow hunting. Last month brought the publication of her latest book, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage” (Viking), with an initial press run of a million copies. By comparison, “Eat, Pray, Love,” released in 2006, has sold more than 6 million copies and has been translated into 30 languages. A feature film directed by Ryan Murphy, starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem, is expected to arrive in theaters later this year. (“It’s surreal. I can’t get my head around it at all,” Gilbert confesses about the casting, smiling slyly.)

It’s a bit funny, words of bel amour coming from a practiced commitment-phobe. Gilbert describes her new book as a “little love album” to her Brazilian-born, significantly older spouse, José Nunes (known as Felipe in her writings). Both were emotionally bruised over divorces and had no intention of legalizing their relationship, until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security unwittingly played justice of the peace.

Passing through Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport during one of their many trips back and forth to the States, the couple were flagged when Nunes’ passport revealed too many consecutive visits to the U.S., even though he had never overstayed his visa. With Nunes’ deportation a certainty, Gilbert appealed to an official there for advice on securing a more permanent visa.

“The Homeland Security officer looked at Felipe, then at me, then back at Felipe,” Gilbert writes in “Committed.” “‘Honestly?’ he said. ‘The two of you need to get married.’ "

The author laughs about it now, but during the year it took to untie all the bureaucratic knots — and living abroad as a nomad — she began researching this thing called matrimony.

“If you want to know what happened to Liz and the Brazilian guy, I’ll tell you, but you’re going to have to learn about the entire history of marriage in Western civilization,” she jokes about “Committed.” “And you’ll get your gossip, you’ll find out what happened to them, but in the meantime you’re going to have to have a bran muffin that goes along with that, because there’s a lot of nutritious information in there that I’m going to make sure that you get.”

That’s a lot to digest, but it slides down easy. Using the Liz-Felipe dilemma as a framing device, Gilbert journeys through time in her explorations of marital customs and attitudes. She makes a deeply personal assessment of her parents’ own union, at other times citing other writers’ musings, sociological studies and statistics about fidelity and compatibility across cultures.

“But I don’t think of it as a romantic book,” Gilbert continues. “I didn’t want the conversation about marriage to be clouded by the froth of romance. I feel it’s too important and serious for that. I’d say ‘Eat, Pray, Love’is an enormously romantic book, even before the love story begins . . . The difference in tone between ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and ‘Committed’ is the difference in tone between romance and marriage. Both about love, but in different ways.”

Yet it has a fairy-tale ending.

After selling the movie rights to “Eat, Pray, Love,” Gilbert — then settled temporarily in Bali with Nunes — was able to plunk down a deposit on a converted church in Frenchtown via her laptop.

In February 2007 the two nonconformists wound up holding their nuptials in a sacred space without leaving home. Last spring, the two reopened their import business, Two Buttons, in a cluster of warehouses on Trenton Avenue. The space reverberates merrily with the sounds of jangling beads, bell chimes, rib-shaking gongs and peals of laughter as Gilbert munches on Girl Scout cookies with her neighbors or poses for photos with out-of town fans.

Many of the objects, collected by Nunes in Indonesia or India, for example, have their own love stories to tell. A carved panel of scenes from the Kama Sutra is encased in a glass tabletop (Gilbert calls it “the coffee table of love”), and a painting of the Hindu god Krishna seducing a gopi maiden speaks to devotion. "She’s dewy-eyed and overcome by love,” Gilbert explains, shrugging. “Not my kind of guy.”

Between speaking engagements (she’s at the State Theatre in New Brunswick on Feb. 23), the writer plans to continue her work with the food bank Frenchtown Feeds Frenchtown and the Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance, while getting her hands dirty with gardening.

“I like the grittiness of New Jersey, although Philadelphia, where I lived for many years, certainly has plenty of grit,” she says.

“I think it keeps people grounded in the real. There’s a limit to how many airs you can put on when you live in New Jersey, and I like that in my neighbors. I like that in myself. I like our little, stubborn pride.”